Introduction

Before diving into implementing a full API monitoring solution, it’s important to understand the core concepts of Serverless Monitoring and how AWS observability tools integrate seamlessly within serverless environments.

🔍 Serverless Monitoring & Observability

While serverless applications eliminate infrastructure management, they introduce new challenges in monitoring, debugging, and ensuring SLA compliance. To address this, AWS offers a comprehensive suite of tools to:

  • Monitor performance metrics
  • Trace execution flows
  • Trigger real-time alerts

—all without managing servers.

🧩 AWS Services Used

In this project, we’ll build an end-to-end API monitoring system using serverless architecture, incorporating the following AWS services:

  • Compute: AWS Lambda
  • API Management: Amazon API Gateway
  • Database: Amazon DynamoDB
  • Monitoring & Observability:
    • Amazon CloudWatch Logs for centralized logging
    • CloudWatch Metrics for tracking latency, traffic, and errors
    • CloudWatch Alarms + SNS for real-time alerting
    • AWS X-Ray for distributed tracing and performance analysis

🧠 Overview of AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda lets you run backend logic in response to events without provisioning or managing infrastructure. Benefits include:

  • Automatic scaling and high availability
  • Seamless integration with API Gateway and CloudWatch
  • Event-driven architecture with flexible memory and timeout configuration

🛠️ Hands-on Implementation

In this workshop, you’ll be guided through building a full serverless monitoring system, including:

  • Creating a Lambda-based API with API Gateway
  • Integrating CloudWatch Logs and Metrics for performance tracking
  • Setting up CloudWatch Alarms with SNS to notify on anomalies
  • Enabling AWS X-Ray for request tracing and error diagnosis
  • Visualizing metrics and logs for continuous monitoring
  • Writing basic documentation for monitored APIs

✅ Outcome: By the end of this workshop, you’ll have a fully observable, alert-driven, serverless API system — powered entirely by native AWS services.